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Motorola will have to modify its Android smartphones or pay Microsoft a licensing fee if it wants to continue selling them in the United States.

After postponing its decision several times, the U.S. International Trade Commission ruled Friday that Motorola’s Android phones violate a Microsoft patent, and ordered an import ban for the offending devices.

“Microsoft sued Motorola in the ITC only after Motorola chose to refuse Microsoft’s efforts to renew a patent license for well over a year,” Microsoft corporate vice president and deputy general counsel David Howard said in a statement. “We’re pleased the full Commission agreed that Motorola has infringed Microsoft’s intellectual property, and we hope that now Motorola will be willing to join the vast majority of Android device makers selling phones in the U.S. by taking a license to our patents.”

If the decision survives the review period and appeal process, Motorola could license the Microsoft patent or build a workaround. The decision will affect all the Motorola Blur and Google Experience devices that existed at the time of the trial, including the Droid 2, Cliq and Devour, and any devices using the patent that are developed after the decision.

Facebook Inc. barely moved the needle on its first day of trading, ending up essentially flat near its IPO price of $38 a share.

The stock jumped 12 percent in the opening minutes of trading on Friday before slipping back from $43 to close to the $38 price IPO investors paid on Thursday.

The Wall Street Journal cited an unnamed source who said that the underwriters on the deal stepped in to prevent it from dropping below the $38 a share price that was set for initial investors on Thursday.

Facebook's flat debut apparently took a toll on other social networking companies, including double-digit drops at Zynga Inc. (NASDAQ:ZNGA) and Yelp Inc. (NASDAQ:YELP).

The IPO raised $16 billion for the Menlo Park social networking company and its insiders.

While most people’s eyes glaze over when you mention patents and intellectual property law, they can have a significant impact on a company’s bottom line — both in revenues and legal fees.

Microsoft, to name one Puget Sound-area company, is involved in more than 60 patent infringement lawsuits, according to recent Securities and Exchange Commission filings.

While the company wouldn’t tell me how much it spends on legal fees, a survey published by the American Intellectual Property Law Association found that when $25 million was at risk, companies spent $5 million on legal fees.

If every Microsoft patent infringement case were worth $25 million or more, a conservative estimate would be $300 million in legal fees for Microsoft to fight battles over intellectual property. Some cases may not be $25 million suits, but others, such as the Microsoft-Motorola patent suit that I examined for this week’s print edition of the Puget Sound Business Journal (subscription required), are worth a lot more.

Microsoft has estimated that if it were forced to pay the licensing fee that Motorola has demanded for its video compression and WiFi patents, it would cost the company $4 billion per year.

Facebook Inc.'s initial public offering appears to be taking a toll on other social networking-related stocks Friday, with gaming company Zynga Inc. hardest hit.

Trading in Zynga (NASDAQ:ZNGA) was halted after the stock dropped by more than 13 percent to as low as $7.18 a share. The maker of popular games including Farmville and Words With Friends rebounded later but remained down nearly 6 percent in afternoon trading.

Zynga relies heavily of Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) for its revenue, so any perceived weakness in the IPO could hurt the San Francisco company's stock.

Facebook started its first day of trading up 12 percent but then quickly gave up nearly all of its gains to approach its $38 IPO price before underwriters reportedly stepped in to prop it up again. It was trading up more than 7 percent at nearly $41 later in the day.

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IPO investors on Thursday set a price of $38 a share for Facebook Inc.'s stock, raising $16 billion for the social networking company and its insiders.

That makes Facebook the third largest U.S. IPO ever, behind credit company Visa's $17.9 billion and energy company Enel's $16.5 billion, but it is the most raised in any tech company IPO.

Jim Gray, a Microsoft Corp. computer scientist who vanished while sailing off the coast of San Francisco five years ago, has officially been declared dead.

The New York Times reports that Gray's widow Donna Carnes was granted closure this week when a California court granted a court order that allows a missing person after five years to be presumed dead. Gray was the subject of an intense search mounted by his friends in the tech industry after his boat went missing near the Farallon Islands off the coast of Northern California.

Online Q&A search service Ask.com is granting Seattle three wishes: funding wading pools at a few local parks, handing out free coffee and travel mugs to commuters at park-and-rides the day after Memorial Day and ferrying Mariners fans around in free pedicabs before and after games this summer.

The campaign is part of the company’s “You Asked, We Answered” marketing pitch, and is an interesting twist on the typical PR stunt. Ask.com asked Seattle residents to vote on which three things they wanted the company to sponsor.

“We’ve seen such an enthusiastic response to the campaign, both while talking to locals directly and as evidenced by the traffic to our dedicated SeattleAsks site,” Valerie Combs, spokeswoman at Ask.com, said in a press release. “Seattle residents are clearly passionate about their city, so we thought making all three projects a reality would enable us to benefit more people, as opposed to limiting it only to the request that got the most votes.”

The Seattle area has seen the most growth in technology jobs in the country — significantly more than Silicon Valley.

That’s according to a Forbes/Praxis Strategy Group study that measured employment growth in high-tech industry sectors such as software engineering, data processing and STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics).

The study found that, while the Valley employs fewer people in the high tech sector than it did in 2000, the Seattle area has seen a 43 percent jump in high tech employment and 18 percent growth in STEM jobs in the past decade. In just the past two years, the area has seen 12 percent growth in the high tech sector.

The study reported that companies such as Microsoft, Amazon and Boeing are driving that growth through the country’s economic good times and through the bad.

Daily deal company Groupon Inc. will open a 20-person office in Seattle's International District, headed by a former Amazon.com Inc. executive.

The Wall Street Journal's All Things D reports the Groupon Seattle office will be headed by former Amazon exec Vinayak Hegde. Other Amazon execs now working for Chicago-based Groupon include CFO Jason Child, SVP of Product Jeff Holden and SVP of Americas Kal Raman.

Want to buy Bill Gates' old Porsche 911 that he bought a few years after he started Microsoft Corp.?

The 1979 pearlescent turquoise Porsche 911 Turbo model will be auctioned in Vienna, Austria, on June 2. The car comes complete with registration papers that it indeed, was owned by Microsoft's Bill Gates and it could be sold for more than $60,000.

This story was updated Wednesday afternoon to clarify the most recent layoffs.

T-mobile’s announced this week that it will lay off 900 workers and hire 550 for new positions. The news comes after an announcement in March that it was closing call centers around the country and shedding 1,900 jobs.

It is all part of a larger plan to boost the company’s bottom line.

To do that, T-mobile is shifting its focus from being a generic mobile provider to a plan to become the most cost-effective mobile provider for businesses.

Several months ago, T-mobile CEO and President Philipp Humm said the company was “prioritizing and investing in initiatives designed to get T-mobile back to growth in the years ahead – beginning with the transformation of our network.”

Bellevue-based T-Mobile will lay off 900 employees, but it's uncertain how many will be in the Puget Sound area.

The Seattle Times reports the wireless company is planning layoffs and shifting to outsourcing more work, just a few months after shutting down seven of its national call centers. T-Mobile employs 4,800 people in the Puget Sound area and 36,000 nationwide.

In the battle for television platforms, Microsoft Corp. is leading competitors with its Xbox.

According to the New York Times, a report by Forrester Research indicates Microsoft currently leads with Xbox users watching online video through their television sets and holding that audience’s attention for the longest amount of time, with half of all Xbox users connected to the internet.

Want a computer that runs Windows 7 without all the desktop clutter that usually comes with a PC? Microsoft will be happy to get rid of all that clutter, for $99.